Young science journalism: writing popular scientific articles may contribute to an increase of high-school students’ interest in the natural sciences

† This paper is part of a series accompanying the Austrian Young Science Journalism program. Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article at the publisher’s web-site.

ABSTRACT

Far too few high-school students choose subjects from the natural sciences (NaSc) for their majors in many countries. Even fewer study biology, chemistry or physics at university. Those, that do, often lack training to present and discuss scientific results and ideas in texts. To meet these challenges the center for didactics of biology of Graz University has set up the program Young Science Journalism. This new workshop-based interdisciplinary concept was tested in an exploratory study with grade 10 students of one Austrian high school, engaging both the biology and the German teacher of the class. It was our aim to raise students’ interest in the NaSc by encouraging them to write popular scientific articles about self-chosen topics, and to help them improve their writing competence. In this paper we focus on interest development through writing. Results from this pilot study were promising. Using a mixed-method approach (comparing pre- and post-test questionnaires and semi-structured interviews from different time points analyzed qualitatively), we found that almost all students valued the project-related work highly. Most of them showed higher interest in the NaSc at project end with girls, in average, seeming to profit more from project participation. We thus recommend integrating such writing tasks into school curricula to increase students’ interest in NaSc or to even create new interest. Additionally, we introduce a network presentation of questionnaire data as a powerful tool to visualize the effect of an intervention on individual students and student profile groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing
• gender
• interest development
• network analysis of questionnaire data
• reading
• science communication

Acknowledgements

We thank Simone Abels, Franz Rauch, and Mark McDermott for their highly valuable comments on various versions of the manuscript. We are grateful to Sonja Enzinger for providing us with first data from the follow-up ‘Exciting Science’ Project. Finally, we highly appreciate the valuable comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Uwe K. Simon is plant scientist, journalist; teacher (biology/English); currently assistant professor for didactics of biology.

Hanna Steindl is a student of psychology.

Nicole Larcher is a student of psychology.

Helga Kulac is a teacher (biology, sciences, sports).

Annelies Hotter is a teacher (German).

Notes

† This paper is part of a series accompanying the Austrian Young Science Journalism program. Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article at the publisher’s web-site.

1 The high-school student magazine Young Science was founded in 2012 by the Center for Didactics of Biology of Graz University. It is distributed freely amongst high schools of presently four Austrian federal states and has only teenagers as authors who get feedback from scientists and teachers. In May 2015 the fifth issue was published (homepage: http://young-science-magazin.com/).

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Austrian Ministry of Education for financial support [IMST-project 436].